CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

This website was a 2004 collaboration between the American Social History Project and Brooklyn College. Redesigned in 2015 it chronicles student experiences with the college newspaper, the Vanguard, during a period in which civil liberties were threatened on college campuses around the country. These student journalists, some of whom were WWII veterans, were involved with the Vanguard when President Harry Gideonse of Brooklyn College shut it down and suspended several of its writers and editors. The closure was the culmination of an ongoing struggle over the newspaper's content. Vanguard journalists, an eclectic group of civil libertarians with a range of political orientations, asserted that the president closed the paper in order to squelch student opinions that did not conform to those of the administration. Gideonse, they charged, had brought the Cold War to the college.